The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century"-- Provided by publisher.
Completely revised and updated to include the most up-to-date selections, this is a bold and bright reference book to the novels and the writers that have excited the world's imagination. This authoritative selection of novels, reviewed by an international team of writers, critics, academics, and journalists, provides a new take on world classics and a reliable guide to what's hot in contemporary fiction. Featuring more than 700 illustrations and photographs, presenting quotes from individual novels and authors, and completely revised for 2012, this is the ideal book for everybody who loves reading.
In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.
This new edition provides a critical yet accessible account of the strategic role of human resource management within organizations. Building upon the success of the first edition, this edition contains new chapters on culture and values in HRM in addition to expanding coverage of individual performance and development. Updated to include the latest research and development, it continues to challenge students to critically assess the role and contribution of human resource to organizations. Companion Website: http://www.palgrave.com/business/boxallandpurcell/
One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo's writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time. Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo's ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.
Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as 'the last modernist', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy. So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge. Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett's writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.
J Curve is a humorous contemporary tale of how a high flyer in business allows greed to become his main motivation and potentially his downfall. The story opens in October 2014 in the City of London. Brett Hunter, the supposedly suave and sophisticated, Managing Director of Sobbolds Leisure; brewery owners, with an extensive portfolio of hotels, pubs, restaurants and much more, is about to embark on his biggest deal to date. The takeover of Gulbey- Barrett's, the sleeping drinks conglomerate giant. Hunter believes that he is nearing the pinnacle of his career, with the social trappings associated with this. His parallel life though is driven by greed. In the weeks that follow Hunter's world begins to disintegrate, but he hasn't got to where he is without the ability to fight his corner. Max Shadpole though, the Executive Editor of The Sunday Post, a national tabloid newspaper has been on his case for a long time and whilst Hunter is distracted by the impending business deal, Max edges towards exposing the real Hunter. Throughout J Curve looks at the characters and their lives; magnifying warts and all of those involved in the impending City takeover. The glamorous, high flying bankers, Jayne Russell and Jane Morgan play prominent roles and their contrasting characters are illuminated as the story progresses. The Directors at Gulbey's, in particular the upstanding Edward Goodyear and the eccentric Guy Gulbey, prove that tragedy and day to day humour are both fundamental to everyday life. Threaded throughout the story is how life at the top can be very lonely. J Curve avoids the technicalities of business, concentrating on how life spins in many directions for all those involved, moving at a fast pace, culminating in many revelations and an unexpected twist of fate.
If Trollope, Cooper and Christie could ever have collaborated on a novel they would probably come up with something very similar to 'Stumped Identity'. Rory Embers, a teenager in long term foster care along with his four younger siblings in urban North London, wants to find his real father and seeks retribution for the life he has given them. To find his father he gains the help of Sophie Anderson, a young Social worker who, unbeknown to Rory, has an agenda of her own. Their investigations lead them to the seemingly idyllic West Country village, Craig Dell, where the cricket club is the hub of the village. Here in the heart of middle England, villagers go about their business and pleasure. Behind the net curtains all is not quite so straight forward and an unconventional lifestyle and seedy underbelly is slowly uncovered. But which of the residents is Rory's father? Two fit the bill precisely; Phil 'Popeye' Embers, the village butcher and Miles Harrington, the recently arrived, secretive peddler of pornography. Not until the final pages is the 'who done it' revealed. 'Stumped Identity' is a fast paced yarn that has humour threaded throughout whilst addressing a serious social issue.
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